Cloud Storage Solutions (Host Software Group)

We have just made the latest version of IBM Storage Enabler for Windows Fail-over Clustering publicly available on IBM Fix Central.

I would like to highlight some of the new features and improvements introduced in version 1.1.0:

Security-wise, the credentials for XIV systems utilized by the cluster are now stored in a secured keyring, as opposed to the plain-text registry keys in the previous versions

On the same note, from now on, you can store separate sets of credentials for each XIV system the cluster node is exposed to (upon upgrades, the registry stored single set credentials will be automatically stored in the encrypted keyring for each storage system)

Additional CLI commands were added for eased configurability, such as, the registry key controlling the forced-fail-over policy (previously known as the 'red-button') that now can be set from the command line directly

Verbosity was significantly enhanced, the '--install', '--uninstall' , '--deploy' commands now report every action performed to the console for better transparency

The '--report' command output has been enriched with additional information regarding the mirror status of the XIV volumes and more

Added Support for Windows Server 2012 Fail-over Clustering

The product code underwent major improvements to make the it both more stable and efficient

In addition several major issues were resolved, such as those related to deployments where XIV disks resided in the 'Available Storage' cluster group and issues related to XIV Mirror resource behavior upon Cluster Service failure.

The new version of the IBM Storage Enabler for Windows Fail-over Clustering and the related documentation can be found here.

Once again, we are proud to announce the release of the latest IBM XIV Host Attachment Kit 1.10.0.

The main feature of this release is Windows Server 2012 support. From this version onward, HAK is fully compatible with your new & shiny installation of Windows Server 2012. Go ahead and take it for a spin!

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve ease of use, we have translated the Windows Installer of HAK to Japanese as well, for the benefit of our Japanese speaking users. More languages to follow.

In addition to the above, we have also resolved several bugs and known issues from previous versions, including among others:

Increased reliability in regard to volume size reporting in xiv_devlist

Improved stability during the configuration phase of iSCSI connections on Solaris

Path counts are reported more accurately in xiv_devlist on HP-UX

We have resolved a known issue in xiv_syslist on HP-UX, regarding XIV System modules and ports connected to the host